The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Random Stuff

Friday, December 5, 2008

Random Stuff

This is just a collection of entirely random stuff since I have a low fever today and I am stuck in the house and really tired. I am almost never sick; I think it's been two years since I even had a cold.

I figured I would put our dog, Mazy Blue, on the blog because she has nothing to do with this blog and that's kind of the point of randomness.

First random thought: I like pie. I mean, I really like pie. I think when I am in the home, wild with dementia and not wanting to go to the doctor, the attendants will tell me, "But Anne, anyone who gets their check up gets a slice of pecan pie."
I'll knock the attendants over to get on board that cardio van.

I feel really bad that I have gotten so many emails from people who practice cutting. I did blog about it twice, but I don't know that much about it. In fact, I had never heard of it until right before I blogged about it. I know I emailed some of you and said I had no plans about writing a YA about cutting when you asked. I think I might write my next YA with a character who cuts, but it wouldn't "be about cutting" the way some other books are. This is only in the planning stages, sort of being thought about. So maybe yes to that question.

I listened to an interview with the Pregnant Man who weirds me out beyond belief. Am I the only one who thinks of Horton Hatches the Egg when s/he talks? Or have I read one too many children's books?

Right now, I am reading Feed by M.T. Anderson -- it's amazingly good. Not an easy read for teens, but he reminds me of what Ray Bradbury was to the 60's.

I can't stand Tyra Banks. I hardly ever watch tv, but this morning my eyes hurt too much to read, so I put the tv on. Does anyone like her as much as she likes herself?

My daughter tried to create a curved ruler last night to measure round things.

I have 37 papers to grade by Monday and I haven't started Christmas shopping.

There is probably something very wrong with the lives of people who send me holiday cards that arrive the day after Thanksgiving.

Speaking of holiday cards, do any of their kids ever mess up? Why don't those letters ever say, "Little Mikey got suspended for smoking in the bathroom, and it wasn't a cigarette..." Is it me or are those letters one long brag?

I can't decide whether I like or don't like blogging. Sometimes it reminds me of decorating my locker in the eighth grade so kids who were "like me" would talk to me, and the ones who weren't would stay away. Is there any actual point to blogging?
I guess it's a good way to waste time like I am doing now.

I've sneezed six times while writing this.

I think I'm going to lie down now. I'll come back tomorrow to see if this made any sense. And my dog keeps looking at the computer. I don't think she recognizes herself; I think she's hoping it's a machine, like the micro, that will produce food at some point.

8 comments:

Stephanie J. Blake said...: I hate Tyra, also. Random posting is more fun than normal posting. Feel better, friend.; Friday, 05 December, 2008
Anonymous said...: Did you start writing the book about cutting? Are you going to have updates on it?

-Heather; Friday, 05 December, 2008
Kimbra Kasch said...: I love randomness.

I love dogs and ice cream - not pie, much.

I love blogging. Guess it's because I spent the last 24'ish years on my kids' lives. Blogging is about me - well and them too. I'm a Mom, what can I say?...; Friday, 05 December, 2008
TerriRainer said...: Hope you feel well, I'm up late with a sick 8 year old as I type (she's the fifth one in the house to get sick in the last two weeks).

OMG...my brain so works like your post. It's all over the place and so often random things just pop outta my mouth.

Good luck with that cutting character. My best friend's daughter cut for years, so I know how she as a parent felt, and I had so many talks with her daughter about it....I was kind of like that neutral party.

:) Terri; Sunday, 07 December, 2008
Marcia said...: I hope your fever's gone -- though I seldom consider it a disadvantage to be "stuck in the house." :)

I love your random post. And the honesty about blogging. Although I just read elsewhere this morning that "in these hard times" keeping ourselves "out there" is all the more important. So that's what we are doing when we blog -- the writing-related stuff that isn't as much fun as writing. So maybe blogging is one of the better of such things, since it actually does involve writing? OK, this is not MY random blog post, so enough . . . :); Monday, 08 December, 2008
Carrie Harris said...: I hope you're feeling better. Had a friend who was a cutter, and that's tres scary. And this is about as random as your post, isn't it?; Monday, 08 December, 2008
Tabitha said...: I can't stand Tyra either. And I hope you're feeling better now.

On a completely random note, congrats on being a finalist for the Cybils!! :); Wednesday, 10 December, 2008
Anne Spollen said...: Yes, CW, random posting is fun.

No, Heather, I have only one page of the book, and it's not "about cutting" -- the girl in it cuts, but she does a lot of other stuff. I have another book to finish before I start that one, so it will be a while. But thanks for asking!

Kim, I love dogs and ice cream, also. I always have both in the house.

I know, Terri. My boys have friends who cut (sexist pig that I am, I thought it was more a "girl" thing). I don't talk to the kids about it b/c they keep telling me they got scratched or had "an allergy to wool." Uh huh.

Thanks, Marcia. I don't mind being stuck in the house if the weather is bad or my car is not working, but stuck when you have no energy is the pits. You just keep looking at all the stuff around you that needs to get done and you're just like blehhhh.

Naw, Carrie, that was connected in a certain way. I sort of get it (maybe a bad sign, huh?)

And thanks, Tabitha. I confess to never having heard of a Cybils Award before. I'm guessing they are sort of like a people's choice award for books.; Thursday, 11 December, 2008

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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